Help Starting My Clothing Design Company?

Starting Out

I am a new fashion designer with my business partner, We want to start a design company that will focus on creatively constructed ready-wear clothing for Men & Women providing embroidery and screen printing with creative construction/ patch work/ European style, also possibly making ready-wear costume designs.we want to start this in Chicago, il area but we are currently in Michigan. We don’t know what to name it yet, My name is “Que Shebley” and his name is “Martin Andrade” we wanted to try to put our names in it in a creative way but not limited to. we will be focusing on ages from 16-40, because our designs should range from edgy dramatic to normal casual with a twist. We don’t have a large budget to work with to start but do have some nacessary machines to start and fabrics and location, we will be working from home, we were thinking of first investing in a screen printing machine so that way we can start from the simplest jobs to sell to companies and businesses in need of basic screen printing clothings for their logos and etc…..

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Jay’s Answer: You want to start first with a business/marketing strategy.

If your demographic is 16-40 (but not exclusively), who specifically would want your designs? People in Chicago? Men? Women? Professionals? Clubbers? At what cost? Internet sales? Fashion shows? Custom or mass-market? Sizing?

Why your designs? What other companies sell products that compete with yours? No doubt, there are a lot of other startup design companies likewise targeting this age range – how will your products be different? How will you know that your designs appeal to the group you’re targeting?

How will people see your designs? In person at shows, flea markets, farmers’ markets, street corners, trunk shows, or consignment shows?

As you can see, your strategy has nothing to do with your budget/equipment. It has everything to do with identifying and finding people who want what you’re selling. If you can’t find the people easily (and they can’t find you), don’t start the business. You’ll be waiting a long time until you get the sales you’re looking for.

The narrower your demographic, the easier it is to get the right message in front of your prospect. Once your strategy is clear, then you can start figuring out a marketing plan: how much money to spend (on what and when).

As far as your business name, this is one of the last things your really need to focus on. If you (or your partner) already have name recognition, then use it in the business name. Otherwise, your name should reflect your target market – what names appeal to that group? There are 2 basic naming camps: a utilitarian name (Chicago Edgy Fashion Co.) or a nonsense word (DramaEdge). Utilitarian names are easier to recognize/remember for people. Nonsense words work well if you’re willing to put in the effort to educate your prospects.

Summary: You don’t need a large budget to make a successful company, but you do need a great strategy & plan to make sure you don’t waste your money getting started.

(Disclaimer: I help small businesses create/implement their marketing strategy/plans)

How Can I Market My "How To Start Your Maid Service" Guide?

eMarketing, Products

We currently own a non franchised Maid Service and trying to create a how to manual. How to market, price and keep customers as well as having a web site for exclusive content and know how we’ve learned. I understand it’s a relatively easy business to start and operate. However, we are finding that a lot of information in many of the how to "start" a cleaning business are very general. We are in a vacation area and a lot of our business is servicing rental homes, condos, etc. We believe we have a niche if we could tell other aspiring and existing cleaning companies how to market and go after these clients. How do I do market research to see if it’s a viable idea.

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Jay’s Answer: To find out if people are looking for this information see how many people are searching for:

  • cleaning business
  • commercial cleaning business
  • house cleaning business
  • carpet cleaning business
  • start a cleaning business
  • starting a cleaning business
  • how to start a cleaning business
  • office cleaning business
  • window cleaning business
  • cleaning service
  • cleaning services
  • house cleaning service
  • home cleaning business
  • house cleaning services

You’ll find that there’s mid-low search interest, and high advertising competition.

Before you spend any money on advertising the solution, make sure you can prove ROI on your business (using these tips) and also that the information is transferable (others have followed the tips and they worked for them as well). Then, you have the "case studies" to sell the system – whether it be a book, video, seminar, franchise, etc.

How Can I Market My “How To Start Your Maid Service” Guide?

eMarketing, Products

We currently own a non franchised Maid Service and trying to create a how to manual. How to market, price and keep customers as well as having a web site for exclusive content and know how we’ve learned. I understand it’s a relatively easy business to start and operate. However, we are finding that a lot of information in many of the how to "start" a cleaning business are very general. We are in a vacation area and a lot of our business is servicing rental homes, condos, etc. We believe we have a niche if we could tell other aspiring and existing cleaning companies how to market and go after these clients. How do I do market research to see if it’s a viable idea.

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Jay’s Answer: To find out if people are looking for this information see how many people are searching for:

  • cleaning business
  • commercial cleaning business
  • house cleaning business
  • carpet cleaning business
  • start a cleaning business
  • starting a cleaning business
  • how to start a cleaning business
  • office cleaning business
  • window cleaning business
  • cleaning service
  • cleaning services
  • house cleaning service
  • home cleaning business
  • house cleaning services

You’ll find that there’s mid-low search interest, and high advertising competition.

Before you spend any money on advertising the solution, make sure you can prove ROI on your business (using these tips) and also that the information is transferable (others have followed the tips and they worked for them as well). Then, you have the "case studies" to sell the system – whether it be a book, video, seminar, franchise, etc.

How Can We Estimate Website Conversion Rates?

eMarketing

We have recently acquired a small Japanese education agency for study in Australia. www.goshu-ryugaku.com – and we are trying to do some simple modelling of the likely sales once we can get the SEO sorted out.

What is the likely conversion rate of unique visitors to enquiries? And how can we maximize that?

What is the likely conversion rate of enquiries to sales (we will be using dedicated sales people with email / messenger and telephone for dialogue).

Do you think my guestimate of 10% conversion of hits to contacts and 5% of contacts to sales is realistic?

We believe we can generate a good number of hits…but how many do we need to get the number of sales we want?

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Jay’s Answer: It all focuses on your website copy. Your home and landing pages need to be focused on your goal of generating enquiries, and well crafted to help people understand what you do, for whom, why they should contact you, and why your business is much better than the others.

If your copy is great, then you should be able to generate a fair bit of enquiries.

As far as converting enquiries to sales, this now depends upon your sales staff – how good they are at listening to the prospect’s needs and addressing them. Of course, price is important, but value for that price is even more so.

Generating traffic to your website is easy – it’s generating the right type of traffic – people that really need your services.

As far as conversion rates for websites, they generally are at 1% (on average).

What’s a Good Tagline For Our Local Theatre?

Clubs + Associations, Names + Taglines

We are creating a new season brochure for our theatre, and I’m looking for a tagline. The overall theme/graphic will be that, for lack of a better quick phrase, "this is the hot ticket". It actually goes a bit deeper than that. Our attendance had been down for a few years, but has recently increased, thius the "hot ticket" aspect.

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Jay’s Answer:

  • See What People Will Be Talking About
  • Great Theatre In Your Backyard
  • Plays To Capture Your Imagination
  • Live Theatre Like You’ve Never Seen It

How Can I Attract More Customers To My Nonprofit Thrift Boutique?

Products, Publicity

As off-shoot main business (lg upscale consignment ) started thrift next to one store. Thrift separate store. Tiny. 700 sqft sales-19 years. Main business left unsold stuff becomes main business’ property but wanted to sell to benefit community. Solution – operate the thrift for a different group local non-profits’s and split sales quarterly. Cute/boutique like. No smells/junk. Decorated. Clothes, books, jewelry, small decoratives. Down outside hallway, around corner/cheap rent. Prices dirt. Get same customers. Don’t care $ for NP’s. 2 problems: How to advertise/get new customers w/out increasing public donations ’cause mostly crap/big labor/disposal costs. How to reward current repeat customers w/out giving away NP’s profits or train to wait for ‘sales’. (Staff so tired of hagglers)

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Jay’s Answer: Your question is basically, how can my store (which supports non-profits and sells goods cheaply) get more customers?

A thrift store is basically like an indoor garage sale – you don’t know what’s there until you show up, and it can change daily. The people who are looking for a bargain will continue to shop your store, and haggle as well. So, you need to do something different. Make it easy for people who are looking for your goods to find them.

  • Create a website for your store, and list the inventory (allowing searching).
  • Create a service for people who are looking for something special to be notified when/if it comes in (and you could charge for this VIP service).
  • List your new goods daily on Craigslist for your community.Connect with a local business that handles eBay (or other online) auctions. You’ll no doubt be able to sell your (better) goods for more $

The key is connecting your supply (of goods) with the proper demand.

Need An Event To Attract Customers To Our Shopping Center!

Publicity

We have a fairly large shopping center along busy highway. Entrances and exits were not well planned. The center is so broken up with free standing buildings and parking lot areas that customers cannot find their way around the lot easily. I get phone calls from inside the lot asking where my store is located! We have several large retailers…Costco, Stein Mart, HomeGoods/Marshalls and several small restaurants (Outback and Carrabbas are the two biggest.) Parking is limited. My strip is closest to and facing the main street but developer felt it necessary to plan pine trees on berm in front of our store. Tall trees also planted behind which hides us from rest of center. Almost all of the merchants in the center are willing to contribute/participate to increase traffic. The village government is not so helpful. Even new signs and banners are prohibited. Any ideas if some kind of "event" (e.g. car show, carnival, snow making machine (we’re in FL) would be of benefit for (1) getting customers into the center and (2) getting them familiar with all the stores in this chopped up center. If so, which events have worked for you? If not, what do you suggest? My concerns are whether (1) the parking lot would hold a large crowd and (2) would it be a distraction from the stores rather than a benefit.

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Jay’s Answer: Invite the local boy/girl scouts to come and help lay the footwork to your stores. Have each child assigned a paint color, a route (and perhaps a store). Their job is to step into their paint color, and create footsteps for their route. (The paint could be washable, of course, if the merchants are concerned). Then, create a color-coded map that matches the footsteps.

You now have an "event", a theme, and a result that will help foot traffic.

What’s a Good Slogan For A Christmas (Popcorn) Gift?

Names + Taglines

I work for a trucking company and one of our customers is a kettle corn company. For the holidays we are giving bags of this popcorn out to each of our other customers that we deliver to. We have permission from them to put our own fun label saying happy holidays on it from the company and we are looking for something catchy. Something like "We just popped in to say Happy Holidays" Or something like that. Any ideas?

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Jay’s Answer:

  • Our corny present to you
  • Thanks for being sweet to us…
  • When you think of trucking, whose name pops up?

How Can I Create A Brochure For an English Daycare School?

Services, Starting Out

My brother’s English language school in Greece has a pre-junior class for 6 year olds that learn the foreign language as they play. It is unique and innovative for Greece and it is going very well.

He needs to give leaflets to kids at school. It has to be impressive so as to keep it as well as and give it to their mothers.

I think he should create a separate logo with cartoon characters for starts, but another school has already done it (they copied the whole idea of a junior school in fact).

The leaflet could be a weekly schedule, but small kids do not need a weekly program really.

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Jay’s Answer: Don’t send the flyers home with the students. Mail them to the parents directly. Enclose them in an envelope with the return address of the school. That will further get the parents’ attention.

The logo isn’t the key – the content of the class is. Why would parents want to enroll in the English language school – what’s the benefit to the child? The parents? What is the competition like for other pre-junior classes (not just English pre-junior)?

Having testimonials from other students and parents ("We loved learning English", "Our Travel To England Was More Fun", "My Child Helped Us Get Directions!", etc.) in the leaflet is also key.

Don’t send the leaflet weekly. Send it out before the beginning of the next semester and mid-semester (or when you have something new to announce). You also want to have a "call to action" – something like "Enrollment Closing Soon!"

Waiting For Your Cat To Bark?

Book Reviews

Buy This Book The subtitle of this book (“Persuading Customers When They Ignore Marketing”) gives a hint about its purpose: how to appeal to your prospective customers. While the book can be enjoyed by any small business owner, the information is a bit more sophisticated than the usual “here’s some simple ways to improve your business’ marketing”.

The authors have developed Persuasion Architecture™ which attempts to overcome the traditional obstacles to connecting with your customers:

  1. Uncovery : Identifying the key benefits for your customer.
  2. Wireframing : The steps of the marketing “experience”.
  3. Storyboarding : The mock-ups of the marketing experience.
  4. Prototyping : The “final” marketing pieces.
  5. Development : Ensuring that the prototype matches the wireframe experience.
  6. Optimization : Measuring the results and refining the message.

Persuasion Architecture attempts to figure out all the different ways a prospective customer would need information, and provide it to them ahead of time. They’ve extended the traditional business school model of AIDA (Attention -> Interest -> Desire -> Action) to AIDAS (Attention -> Interest -> Desire -> Action -> Satisfaction), since satisfaction is what generates word-of-mouth mentions.

For me, the best parts of the book were chapter fifteen (“Personas” – which described the different filters people use to get information) and chapter 20 (“The Human Operating System” – which described the basic 4 ways people ask questions).

The key points about personas:

  • Topology: How is your product used? What are the competitors? How did people solve the problem before your product came about?
  • Psychographics: How do different people behave (based on lifestyle and personality profile)
  • Demographics: Where are our customers and what do they look like?
  • Empathy: How can you “do for others as they would like it done to them?”

The 4 ways people ask questions:

  • Methodical: focus on HOW (“What are the details? What’s the fine print?”)
  • Spontaneous: focus on WHY or WHEN (“How can you get me to what I need quickly? Do you offer superior service?”)
  • Humanistic: focus on WHO (“How will your product or service make me feel? Who are you? Can I trust you?”)
  • Competitive: focus on WHAT (“What are your competitive advantages? What are your credentials?”)

I would have liked to see some specific step-by-step examples of applying the Persuasion Architecture to existing businesses (rather than identifying some businesses that use a feature or two of the process). Nonetheless, the book can serve as a good checklist for developing (or improving) your marketing strategy.